Elevate Difference

Reviews of Harper Collins

The Last Pretence

In the South Indian town of Machilipatnam, Mallika gives birth to twins, Tara and Siva. Emotionally and psychologically damaged when her daughter dies during childbirth, Mallika finds herself unable to love Siva who is a constant reminder of Tara’s death. Pretending that Siva is Tara, both Mallika and Siva embark on a downward spiral of self-destruction that ends in tragedy.

Laughed 'Til He Died: A Death On Demand Mystery

I do like a good mystery, though I normally tend to go for either an author I know, a series I know, or a “world” I know. Since the author and locale of Laughed ‘Til He Died were both completely new to me, the fact that this book held my interest, and had me doing some late-night page-turning to see how it all turned out, speaks well for it. A South Carolinian island is the location for this latest installment in the Death Walked In series.

Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India

The great Indian middle class is that layer of society that no one bothered about until couple of decades ago. People in this layer did not fall into the category of "have nots," and hence did not attract any sympathy. At the same time they did not have the luxury of "haves," so it did not make any economic sense for the others to target them. They lived in their own world where they had enough for their basic needs, but nothing for their desires.

Bitch is the New Black

I don’t believe bitch is the new Black any more than I believe that thirty is the new twenty. As our most recent racial shenanigans have reminded us, Black is still its same ol’ Black self. And anybody who engages in the same shamtastic behaviors at thirty as she did at twenty is just plain trifling.

Bloodborn

Bloodborn is captivating from start to finish, keeping me reading from cover to cover. Not only was the plot intriguing, Kathyrn Fox kept you wrapped in the victims lives as if you were really there. You felt her emotions with every word you read. Without a dull moment in the story, this book has the mystery and suspense that will keep you guessing until the very end. Work driven, Dr. Anya Crichton has a lucrative career as a forensic pathologist.

A Duty to the Dead: A Bess Crawford Mystery

It’s funny how everyone gets something different from a story. I like it best when a book is categorized in a genre that, after reading it, is slightly off from my own understanding. It makes it even more fun to read when my expectations are so astonishingly surpassed. A Duty to the Dead starts off with a bang. Before the end of chapter one, a gigantic wartime hospital ship, the infamous Brittanic, is at the bottom of the sea.

The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder

_"This world is made up of stories—every person's story, those that are hidden, and those that are outright and clear. This is the story of one named for a flower." _ The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder is the story of a young girl's experience growing up in 1950s Louisiana.

Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America and Found Unexpected Peace

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.- Frederick Nietzsche William Lobdell was a twenty-something flake. He blew one marriage and was on his way to blowing a second when a friend dragged him to a gathering of evangelical Christians. Lobdell was born again, and he started attending Sunday services. His wife, a lapsed Catholic, appreciated his newfound Christianity and joined with him in a subsequent odyssey through various Christian denominations. Lobdell was a born again with one difference: he was a journalist.

My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

My Sister, My Love is Joyce Carol Oates’ thirty-fifth novel in forty-five years.

Running from the Devil

Jamie Freveletti’s authorial debut, Running from the Devil, begins with the story of Emma Caldridge, a chemist and ultra-marathon runner who boards a plane for Bogota and ends up in a plane crash in the Colombian jungle. She is thrown from the wreckage during the crash, and thus spared from being taken hostage by a group of Colombian guerillas.

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life by Catherine Clinton, is a fascinating account of this very complicated and very misunderstood woman. I knew little about Mary Todd prior to reading this book and what I did know was mostly based on my own mythical ideas about Honest Abe and his wife Mary.

Never Tell a Lie

In a suburban area in Massachusetts, David and Ivy Rose host a yard sale as a way of getting rid of items left in the attic by previous owners of their recently purchased Victorian home. During the sale, a woman named Melinda, whom they both knew in high school, informs David and Ivy that as a child she played in the house they now own and would like to see the inside again.

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

Guyland is less of a place than an attitude, a realm of existence. Occupied by young, single, white men, its main demographic is middle class kids who are college-bound, college co-eds, or recent graduates in the United States. They live in communal housing with fraternity brothers or other recent grads. They work entry-level jobs but act aimless. They have plenty of time to party like they did in college and subsist on pizza, beer, and a visual diet of cartoons, sports, and porn. They hook up with women, but rarely form meaningful relationships.

Bright Shiny Morning

I have no beef with James Frey. I think he’s a talented writer; a zeitgeist of a generation; a younger and less punctuationally-correct Don DeLillo, of a sort; and I believe Oprah is a mean and deceitful ratings leech. I think memoir is a complicated genre at best, and I tend to believe most (if not all) of the story as told in this recent Vanity Fair article.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage

Dr. Laura is not a popular personality in many circles, to say the least. She’s anti-choice, anti-feminist and anti-gay. So imagine my surprise when I picked up her latest book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage, and discovered that I actually found some useful advice in it. First of all, a disclaimer: I am not endorsing her political beliefs. And I admit she makes it difficult to get past her gratuitous rants about feminism.
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